Alger Hiss

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Alger Hiss.
Photo courtesy U.S. Bureau of Prisons

Alger Hiss (November 11, 1904 – November 15, 1996) was a high-ranking^[1] U.S. State Department official and Secretary General of the founding conference of the United Nations, who was convicted of perjury in 1950, after denying that he had been a Soviet agent.

"Belief in the guilt or innocence of Alger Hiss became a defining issue in American intellectual life," wrote Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D.-N.Y.), who was instrumental in securing the release of FBI and Venona project files on the case, which had been classified for some 50 years. Concluded the liberal^[2] Democrat in 1998: "Parts of the American government had conclusive evidence of his guilt, but they never told."^[3]

Early life

Alger Hiss was born in Baltimore, Maryland, November 11, 1904,^[4] to a financially comfortable upper-middle-class^[5] WASP family.^[6] When Alger was two years old, his father, an executive with a dry goods firm,^[7] committed suicide by slashing his throat with his own razor.^[8] When Hiss was 25, his sister Mary Ann also committed suicide, by drinking a bottle of Lysol.^[9] Alger's older brother Bosley had died two and a half years before from Bright’s disease, a kidney disorder aggravated by his excessive alcohol consumption.^[10][11]

Johns Hopkins University

As a result of his father's death, Alger inherited $10,000,^[12] the equivalent of more than $200,000 today.^[13] After graduation from Baltimore City College and a year at Powder Point Academy (a private prep school in Duxbury, Massachusetts) and the Maryland Institute of Art, Hiss attended Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University.^[14] As an undergraduate, Hiss' favorite instructors included Broadus Mitchell, whom Hiss would later describe as a "gifted" economics professor with "mildly socialistic" views.^[15] But Mitchell had been Socialist Party candidate for Governor of Maryland^[16] and, according to the personal site of Hiss' son, Tony,^[17] was a well-known Socialist.^[18] Another favorite was José Robles,^[19] a committed Stalinist.^[20] Hiss apparently knew Robles well enough to spend time at his home.^[21] Robles would go on to serve in the Spanish Civil War as a Colonel in the Red Army and interpreter for General Jānis Bērziņš, head of Soviet military intelligence.^[22] Robles was never seen again^[23] after Bērziņš was recalled to Moscow^[24] and shot in Stalin's Great Terror^[25] in 1938.^[26] Robles had apparently been executed by a Communist "special section," according to John Dos Passos, because he "knew too much about the relations between the Spanish war ministry and the Kremlin."^[27] Hiss would later say he too considered going to Spain to fight for the Soviet-backed Loyalist cause.^[28]

Harvard Law School

After graduating in 1926, Hiss went on to Harvard Law School, where he resumed his friendship with boyhood friend Henry Collins^[29] (who was attending Harvard Business School) and served on the Harvard Law Review. Hiss became the protégé of one instructor, future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter—who, said former U.S. President William Howard Taft, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, "seems to be closely in touch with every Bolshevist, Communist movement in this country."^[30] Frankfurter was at the time the leading champion of the convicted murderers Sacco and Vanzetti,^[31][32] revolutionary terrorists who became a Communist^[33] cause célèbre,^[34] and whom Alger Hiss would later emulate.^[35]

Early Career

When Hiss graduated from law school in 1929, Frankfurter got him the coveted^[36] job of law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.^[37] The same year, Hiss married the former Mrs. Priscilla Fansler Hobson (a supporter of perennial Socialist Party presidential nominee Norman Thomas),^[38] whom he had met on a transatlantic cruise when he was nineteen.^[39]

Hiss went on to prestigious^[40] law firms in Boston and New York where, by 1932, his wife Priscilla had registered as a member of the Socialist Party.^[41][42][43] By then, Priscilla Hiss was an active member of American Labor Associates, and Hiss was becoming "radicalized,"^[44] joining the International Juridical Association (IJA) (which "consistently followed the Communist Party line")^[45] along with Harvard Law classmate (and Law Review colleague)^[46] Lee Pressman.^[47]

During this period, Hiss' letters to his wife reflected his increasing radicalism. In 1930, he made a coy reference to the International Workers of the World, writing to Priscilla, "[D]id thee call thyself a Wobbly with an I.W.W. tongue in thy socialistic (I couldn't bring myself to write “Communistic”) cheek." Suggesting that an article questioning the legitimacy of the existing “capitalist order”^[48] did not go far enough, Hiss wrote to Priscilla in 1932, “Has thee seen Archibald MacLeish's article on capitalism in last week's Saturday Review? Felix [Frankfurter] says it is soft thinking after Wilson.”^[49]

New Deal

Agricultural Adjustment Administration

In 1933, Frankfurter sent Hiss a telegram^[50] urging him to join President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal as assistant general counsel to the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA).^[51] At the peak of Stalin's Terror Famine^[52] (during which the Soviets starved some three million Ukrainians to death through collectivization of agriculture),^[53] the AAA restricted U.S. farm production in order to drive up food prices in the depths of the Great Depression.^[54][55] The agency was the brainchild of FDR's Secretary of Agriculture (and future Vice President),^[56] so-called "farm dictator"^[57] Henry Wallace—who would run for President on the Communist-inspired^[58] Progressive Party ticket in 1948, finally recanting his support for the Soviet Union^[59] in 1952.^[60]

In response to a query about candidates for employment at AAA, Pressman, already at the agency, wrote, "I have talked to Alger Hiss and Nat Witt who are considering" taking posts at AAA (Hiss would later deny under oath that he had discussed the position with Pressman).^[61] At AAA, Hiss reunited with IJA colleagues Pressman and Witt as well as Soviet agent^[62] Collins, and became acquainted with the Communist^[63] Harold Ware.^[64] Even before the FBI would learn of Whittaker Chambers' charges, one of Hiss' colleagues at the AAA would tip off FBI investigators that Hiss and his circle were fellow travelers, if not Communists.^[65] Hiss' superior at AAA, Jerome Frank, believing Hiss to be closely linked to a coterie of Communist lawyers at the agency, would later refuse to appear as a character witness for him.^[66] Collins would refuse to testify on grounds of potential self-incrimination.^[67] Pressman would eventually testify that he had been a Communist and a member of the Ware group.^[68] Another AAA official, Nathaniel Weyl, would later testify that he attended Communist cell meetings with Hiss and saw him pay his party dues,^[69][70][71] testimony he would reaffirm in his 2004 autobiography.^[72]

A former GRU station chief in London and New York reported that during the early and middle 1930s Hiss was a source of agent information for a Soviet spy ring in Washington, the Silvermaster group, according to Pavel Sudoplatov, former deputy director of Foreign Intelligence for the USSR.^[73]

Nye Committee

In 1934, again with an assist from Pressman (according to Gardner Jackson),^[74] Hiss became General Counsel for the U.S. Senate's Nye committee,^[75] which investigated people Chairman Gerald P. Nye (R.-N.D.) called Wall Street's "merchants of death,"^[76] whom he accused of conspiracy to lead the U.S. into war with Germany. One scholar has dubbed this a "witch-hunt" for "subversive capitalists," in which Hiss was to Nye what Roy Cohn would later be to Senator Joe McCarthy (R.-Wisc.)^[77] The Soviets took great interest in the work of the committee for its propaganda value^[78] as well as its access to classified documents on U.S. armaments and foreign policy.^[79] Moscow had at least one source on the staff of the committee, which provided valuable documents to the Kremlin in 1935,^[80] the same year an agent code-named "Ales" (pronounced "Alles") began working for Soviet military intelligence.^[81] Nye would tell FBI investigators that he believed Hiss was a Communist at the time,^[82] and would later say he believed Hiss used his position on the committee for espionage.^[83]

Barely a month after joining the committee staff,^[84] Hiss met Whittaker Chambers.^[85] According to Chambers, they were introduced by Communist underground boss^[86] J. Peters;^[87] Hiss would claim that Chambers had wandered into his office without introduction, as a free-lance writer looking for a story.^[88]

One of their mutual contacts at the time was John Herrmann, an AAA official who was a member of the Ware group and courier for the Communist underground (subordinate to Chambers), according to Herrmann's then wife, the radical^[89] novelist Josephine Herbst.^[90] Hiss would later claim that he did not even know Herrmann—a "lie," according to Herbst's biographer.^[91]

Justice Department

In 1935, Hiss transferred into the Justice Department as special assistant to the Solictor General, where he unsuccessfully defended the Agricultural Adjustment Act before the United States Supreme Court^[92] (which ruled the AAA unconstitutional in 1936).^[93]

In the summer of 1936, J. Peters arranged a dummy transaction, according to Chambers, in which Hiss donated his 1929 Ford to the Communist Party.^[94] Hiss would deny this, testifying instead that he had given the car to Chambers^[95] in June 1935, after buying a new car. But Hiss did not buy a new car until some three months after this, and he continued to pay insurance on the Ford for a year after he claimed to have gotten rid of it.^[96]

According to the car's certificate of title, Hiss actually transferred the car on July 23, 1936, to the Cherner Motor Company, which transferred it the same day to the Communist^[97] William Rosen.^[98] The company made no record of the transaction.^[99] Rosen would refuse to answer questions about his role in the transfer or the Communist Party on grounds of potential self-incrimination.^[100] Hiss' attorney, Edward McLean, wrote that Rosen's lawyer, Emmanuel Bloch, told him:

The title transfer bore a signature Hiss acknowledged to be his own, notarized by Hiss' Justice Department colleague W. Marvin Smith. After testifying in 1948 that he had notarized Hiss' signature on the transfer, Smith would plunge to his death down a five-story Justice Department stairwell to the marble floor below; there would be no witnesses.^[103]

At a 1935 dinner at the home of State Department official (and Soviet intelligence source)^[104] Noel Field, Hiss argued with OGPU recruiter Hede Massing that Field should work with Hiss' GRU group, rather than Massing's OGPU group, according to Massing.^[105]

Field would defect in 1948 to Communist Czechoslovakia, where he would tell the secret police that he was fleeing to avoid testifying in the trial of Alger Hiss, whom he identified as a fellow Communist underground agent in the State Department during the mid-thirties, according to official records published in 1990 by Karel Kaplan, former archivist of the Central Committee of the Czech Communist Party.^[106] A 1955 Czechoslovak secret police reinvestigation (obtained in 2000 by Czech human rights activist Karel Skrabek) states, "Noel Field said that … Hiss worked for the USSR as a spy."^[107] Field would end up in Communist Hungary, where in 1954 he would tell Hungarian secret police that he and Hiss "mutually realized we were Communists. Around the summer of 1935 Alger Hiss tried to induce me to do service for the Soviets."^{[108][109][110]}

The transcripts also record Field saying that he turned over State Department documents to Hede Massing in the 1930s. In other statements Field twice said that although Hiss knew that Field “was a Communist,” he strongly supported Field at the State Department and even tried to help him obtain a job as a State Department adviser in the Philippines in 1940.^[111] The dossier likewise records a statement by Field that he briefly visited Hiss in 1939 in America, where they agreed that if either's cover was ever blown, he would communicate to the other indirectly.^{[112][113][114]}

In a 1936 memorandum, found in the NKVD archives by former KGB agent Alexander Vassiliev, Massing complains to Moscow about Hiss (using his real name) talking to Field (whom she refers to by his code name "Ernst"): "Alger told him that he was a Communist," complains Massing, a serious breach of discipline.^[115] As a result, noted Boris Bazarov, OGPU "illegal" station chief for the United States, Field "and Hiss [Bazarov also used Hiss's real name] have been openly identified" as Soviet agents.^{[116][117][118][119]}

According to Massing, Hiss also asked Field to use his connections to help Hiss get into the State Department.^[120][121]

State Department

In 1936, Hiss joined the State Department as special assistant to Assistant Secretary of State for Trade Agreements Francis B. Sayre, son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson.^[122] Two years later, Alger's younger brother Donald, who had followed him to Johns Hopkins, Harvard Law, and a clerkship for Justice Holmes, would join him there, rising to the position of assistant to future Secretary of State Dean Acheson.^[123]

In a cable of the era found in the NKVD archives by Vassiliev, NKVD illegal Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov reports to Moscow that J. Peters (code-named "Storm")^{[124][125][126][127][128]} told him that "Hiss [Akhmerov used his real name] used to be a member of bratskiy organization [CPUSA underground]^[129] who had been implanted into "Surrogate" [cover name for the State Department]^[130] and sent to the Neighbors [GRU]^[131]...."^[132][133]

The year before, at the funeral of Marshal Jozsef Pilsudski in Warsaw, U.S. Ambassador to Moscow William C. Bullitt had confidentially assured the Polish government that the United States would stand by Poland in the event of a Nazi invasion. But after Bullitt reported back to Washington that he had done so, someone at the State Department passed this information to Moscow, which in turn transmitted it to German intelligence (with which Soviet intelligence had maintained liaison since the time of Lenin).^[134] Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels exploited this information to portray the United States as a warmonger. According to reporter Ralph de Toledano, who covered the Hiss trial for Newsweek, the State Department source who passed this information to the Kremlin was Alger Hiss.^[135]

Just before Christmas 1936, Colonel Boris Bykov, head of Soviet military intelligence in the U.S., gave Chambers money to buy four Bokhara rugs for Hiss, Harry Dexter White, George Silverman, and Julian Wadleigh, according to Chambers. Hiss would later claim that Chambers had given him his rug in 1935 in partial payment for rent, but Marxist^[136] Columbia University art historian Meyer Schapiro, who confirmed that he arranged the purchase, produced the canceled check dated December 23, 1936, and the Massachusetts Importing Company of Manhattan, which confirmed selling him the rugs, produced the Bill of Sale. White's widow and Silverman confirmed that they had received their rugs sometime between late 1936 and the fall of 1938. Wadleigh, who confessed to having been a member of Chambers' apparatus and delivering documents to him,^[137] confirmed that he had received his rug for New Year's 1937^[138] and conceded that he understood the rug to be a gift from the Soviets.^[139]

By 1937, the peak of Stalin's Great Terror^[140] (whose victims would number over ten million),^[141] Hiss was delivering packets of documents to Whittaker Chambers at intervals of a week or ten days, according to Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB London station chief who defected in 1985.^[142]

That year, French Premier Édouard Daladier informed Bullitt that two brothers named Hiss, both in the U.S. government, were Soviet agents.^{[143][144][145]} Bullitt “laughed it off as a tall tale, never having heard their names.”^[146]

Also in 1937, Akhmerov cabled Moscow that Michael Straight (code-named "Nigel"), an American member of the NKVD's Cambridge spy ring^[147] (and future FDR speech writer^[148] and publisher of The New Republic),^[149] then working at the State Department, mentioned Hiss (using his real name) as someone with "progressive" views "who occupied a responsible position."^[150] Akhmerov worried that Straight "might guess that Hiss [Akhmerov again used Hiss' real name] belongs to our family" or "find out Hiss's nature" as a GRU agent.^[151]

On November 23, 1937, Whittaker Chambers bought a car, using $400 he said Alger Hiss loaned him.^[152][153] Hiss would deny making the loan,^[154] but records showed that the Hisses withdrew $400 in cash from their savings four days before Chambers bought the car.^[155] At first the Hisses claimed that they had used the money to buy furniture for a new house,^[156] but they had not signed a lease at the time,^[157] and could not produce receipts for any purchases, nor explain why they had used cash from savings when they had checking and charge accounts.^[158]

In 1938, Whittaker Chambers made his final break with the Communists.^[159] Wary after the murder of Ignace Reiss^[160] and disappearance of Juliet Poyntz,^[161] Chambers asked his wife's nephew^[162] to hide what he called his "life preserver"—a packet of copies of documents, hand-written memos and microfilm of documents to be produced in the event of his death or disappearance.^[163][164]

In 1939, Sayre became United States High Commissioner to the Philippines, and Hiss transferred to become personal aide to Stanley Hornbeck, political advisor to the State Department's Far Eastern Division. As his replacement, Hiss urged Sayre to hire Soviet Intelligence source^[165] Noel Field, despite his lack of experience.^[166] Due to the fact that Field had been identified to the State Department as a member of various Red front groups starting in 1926, and as a Communist Party member the previous year,^[167] he did not get the appointment. After his defection behind the Iron Curtain, Field would confirm to East bloc authorities that Hiss knew he was a Communist when he recommended Field as his replacement.^[168]

When in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact the Communist Party organ The Daily Worker came under suspicion for reversing its anti-Nazi posturing, Communist Party official Roy Hudson discussed what to do about it with Soviet agent^[169] Robert Minor, according to Daily Worker editor Louis Budenz. Someone mentioned that Nathan Witt and Lee Pressman could not be of much help as they, too, were under suspicion at the time. According to Budenz, Alger Hiss was then mentioned as a good Comrade who would be helpful.^[170]

The year before, in Paris, defecting former GRU chief in Europe Walter Krivitsky^[171] had identified Hiss as an agent of Soviet military intelligence, according to Alexander Barmine, former Charge d'Affairs at the Soviet Embassy in Athens, who had defected in 1937.^[172] When news of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (which Krivitsky had predicted)^[173] broke on August 23, 1939, Krivitsky warned his Saturday Evening Post ghostwriter, Isaac Don Levine, "Everything that went on in the [U.S.] embassy [in Moscow], especially the major communications between Washington and Bullitt, were quickly relayed to the Soviet secret police."^[174] (Krivitsky would be found shot dead in his Washington hotel room in 1941.^[175] Although he had warned his friends that if he were to be found dead, then he had been murdered,^[176] his death was ruled a suicide.^[177] Krivitsky had been liquidated by one of the NKVD's Mobile Groups for Special Tasks, according to former Soviet espionage official Alexander Orlov.^[178] Orlov's account is corroborated by the Nicolaevsky and Honeyman collections in the archives of the Hoover Institution.)^[179]

Chambers' meeting with Berle

In 1938, Whittaker Chambers confessed to Levine that he had been a courier for the Communist underground. As the joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland^[180] was gearing up, Levine sought to get Chambers an appointment with President Roosevelt, but was diverted by the White House to Assistant Secretary of State for Security Adolf Berle.^[181] On September 2, 1939, Chambers told Berle of an underground apparatus of the Communist Party for employees of the Federal government in Washington, D.C. Its organizer, said Chambers, was Harold Ware, its treasurer Henry Collins;^[182] among its members he identified Lee Pressman, Nathan Witt, and the brothers Alger and Donald Hiss.^[183]

While Chambers talked, Berle took notes. Under the heading “Underground Espionage Agent,” he listed several names, including “Alger Hiss,” with the notation, “Ass’t. to Sayre—CP—1937,” and “Member of the Underground Com.—Active.”^[184] In Berle's diary, the first entry after his visit with Levine and Chambers reads:

After Berle relayed this information to President Franklin Roosevelt, Levine asked Berle how FDR responded. In his 1973 memoir, Levine wrote, “To the best of my recollection, the President dismissed the matter rather brusquely with an expletive remark on this order: ‘Oh, forget it, Adolf.’”^[186]

In 1940, after Levine informed Bullitt of what Chambers had told him about Hiss, Bullitt relayed to Stanley Hornbeck what Daladier had told him. Bullitt advised Alice Roosevelt Longworth and de Toledano that he also took this information directly to FDR.^[187]

Levine also told David Dubinsky, president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, about Chambers' revelations. Dubinsky, wrote Levine, "took up the Chambers matter with the President at the first opportunity and was brushed off with an amiable slap on the back." Levine wrote that he also told fellow journalist Walter Winchell of "a ring of six Soviet agents operating within the State Department alone. In his broadcast of December 12, Winchell announced that he had carried my information to President Roosevelt. Still there was no action."^[188] Winchell's posthumously published memoir confirms Levine's story.^[189]

That September, the Nazi and Soviet armies staged a joint victory parade through the streets of occupied Brest-Litovsk, Poland.^[190] Hiss was at this time among a handful of the Soviets' most important agents, who were run individually and not through spy networks, according to Oleg Gordievsky. Hiss' wartime controller, wrote Gordievsky, was Akhmerov, the leading NKVD illegal in the United States,^[191] who, in a lecture before a KGB audience, identified Hiss as a Soviet agent during World War II.^[192]

In 1941, during the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Dies committee obtained the membership list of the Washington Committee for Democratic Action, which would be confirmed as a Communist front the following year by Roosevelt's Attorney General Francis Biddle.^[193] Included on the roster was the name of Priscilla Hiss,^[194][195] with the notation appended, "Husband with State Department."^[196] In 1941-42 the FBI conducted a Hatch Act investigation of Hiss, in the course of which one of Hiss' former colleagues at the AAA told investigators that Hiss and his circle were fellow travelers, if not Communists.^[197] Hiss denied everything, although he said he thought his wife might have been a member of the League of Women Shoppers, a Popular Front group^[198] identified as a Communist front by the committee in 1939.^[199] In 1942, the FBI sent a report of this investigation to the Secretary of State,^[200] the first of what would become a veritable avalanche of FBI memos and reports on Hiss disseminated to the State Department, Attorney General and White House over the ensuing five years.

Also in 1942, the Bureau interviewed Chambers for the first time.^[201] He repeated his identification of Hiss, among others, as a Communist. In 1943, the FBI obtained the notes Berle had taken during his dinner four years earlier with Chambers and Levine.^[202] That year, an encrypted cable (decrypted in the Venona project and released in 1995) from Pavel B. Mikhailov (code-named "Mol'er"), who (under cover as Soviet Vice Consul in New York) was controller of military intelligence for the NKVD,^[203] to NKVD chief of foreign intelligence Pavel Fitin (code-named "Viktor")^[204] in Moscow, identifying the real names and code names of several agents in the U.S., said the GRU (code-named "Neighbors") reported someone "from the State Department by the name of Hiss."^[205]

The following year, Hiss was promoted to become deputy director of the State Department's Office of Special Political Affairs, a policy-making office for postwar planning and international organization.^[206] In August 1944, he organized the Dumbarton Oaks Conference,^[207] where he served as executive secretary,^[208][209] presiding over the drafting of the proposed United Nations Charter.^[210]

By 1948 Berle, ousted from the State Department, would be serving as chairman of New York's Liberal Party. That year, the New York bureau of the Christian Science Monitor would send a teletype to the home office in Boston, relating a background interview with the party's publicity director, Arnold Beichman:

But in the wake of Dumbarton Oaks, Berle was ousted as Assistant Secretary of State in charge of security, defeated by the State Department's pro-Soviet faction, Hiss prominent among them. As Berle put it:

Yalta

President Truman at the rostrum of the United Nations Charter Meeting with Secretary General of the Conference Alger Hiss seated second from Truman's left.

A State Department internal security probe of Hiss (made public in 1993)^[213] ordered by Secretary of State James F. Byrnes^[214] revealed that in February 1945, Hiss requested top-secret files from the Office of Strategic Services (precursor of the CIA) on British, Soviet, French and Chinese internal security policies, as well as Far East policy;^[215] FBI surveillance at this time found that Hiss also developed "a keen interest in atomic energy," and other matters relating to military intelligence,^[216][217]—all of which was well outside the purview of his office.^[218]

Also in February 1945, Hiss was selected to accompany FDR to his meeting with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta, as aide to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Jr.^[219]

According to Sudoplatov, "One of the officials [at Yalta] we had established confidential relations with was Alger Hiss," who was "highly sympathetic to the interests of the Soviet Union."^[220] He added:

At the conference, the U.S. ceded hegemony over Eastern Europe to Stalin and made a secret agreement giving the Soviet Union three votes in the UN to one for the U.S.^[222] According to confidential GRU sources, during the conference, Hiss gave daily briefings to General Mikhail Abramovich Milshtein, a military adviser to Stalin and the deputy director of the GRU, revealing not only the American negotiating strategy but insights into the attitudes of the American negotiators.^[223]

After the conference, Hiss went on to Moscow, where he was decorated with the Order of the Red Star^[224] by Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov.^[225] On April 25, 1945, Pavel Fitin, head of NKVD foreign intelligence, reported to NKVD Chief Vsevolod Merkulov that Harold Glasser, a Soviet agent in the U.S. Treasury code-named "Ruble," learned of the award from his friend, "Ales," a Soviet military intelligence agent:

This memo apparently refers to Venona decrypt 1822, dated March 30, 1945, in which "Vadim" (Anatoly Gorsky, chief of Soviet intelligence in the U.S.)^[228] reports,^[229] following up on a conversation with "Ales," that "Ales has been continuously working with the neighbors since 1935;" that for "a few years now he has been the director of a small group of probationers [agents]^[230] of the neighbors [GRU],^[231] for the most part drawn from his relatives;" that they were "working on obtaining only military information," since Soviet military intelligence "allegedly are not very interested" in "materials about the Bank [United States Department of State]";^[232] that recently, "Ales and his whole group were awarded Soviet medals"; and that after "the Yalta conference, back in Moscow, one very high-ranking Soviet worker allegedly had contact with Ales (Ales implied that it was Comrade Vyshinskii) and at the request of the military neighbors he conveyed to him their thanks, etc."^[233] Regarding "Ales," one FBI memo reports:

In its unanimous final report in 1997, the bipartisan Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy agreed regarding Ales, "This could only be Alger Hiss"^[236] Analysts at the National Security Agency have also gone on record that Ales could only have been Alger Hiss.^[237] John R. Schindler, professor of strategy at the Naval War College and himself a former NSA analyst, concurs, calling this identification "exceptionally solid" and the evidence "compelling."^[238]

Also in 1945, after State Department liaison Lt. Andrew Roth of the Office of Naval Intelligence was arrested in the Amerasia spy case, Communist Party General Secretary Eugene Dennis told Communist Party National Committee member Jack Stachel that Roth suggested that Alger Hiss might be used to quash the case, according to former CPUSA Politburo member Louis Budenz.^[239]

In March 1945, State Department security officer Raymond Murphy interviewed Chambers. Murphy's notes record that Chambers reiterated his identification of Hiss as a member of the Communist Party underground apparatus, but added that he was also the leader of a cell and not merely a Communist but, said Chambers, an espionage agent who disclosed "much confidential material," as well as an agent of influence who sought to shape U.S. policy "in keeping with the desires of the Communist Party."^[240]

On March 24, FBI agent E.A. Tamm, assistant to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, alerted Robert Lynch, Special Assistant to the Secretary of State, to Chambers' allegations that Hiss had been a member of the underground organization of the Communist Party, and to Hiss' links to Nathan Witt and Lee Pressman. After interviewing Hiss the next day,^[241] FBI official D.M. Ladd furnished Frederick B. Lyon, Chief of the Division of Foreign Activity Correlation of the Department of State, a summary memorandum outlining this information.^[242] On March 26, State Department security officer Robert Bannerman sent Donald Russell, Assistant Secretary of State for Administration, a comprehensive secret report on Chambers' allegations regarding Hiss, recommending "that immediate action be taken to terminate Mr. Hiss's services with the Department."^[243]

United Nations

That month, Hiss was promoted to become Director of the State Department Office of Special Political Affairs. Vassiliev's notes on a cable^[244] he discovered in the Soviet archives report that "Vadim" (Anatoly Gorsky,^[245] then chief of Soviet intelligence in the U.S.) wanted to meet with "Ales" at the upcoming founding conference of the United Nations. It also notes that "Ales" had worked with "Ruble" (Harold Glasser)^[246][247] as a member of a group run by "Karl" (Whittaker Chambers).^[248] According to Vassiliev's notes, the cable adds that "'Ruble' gives 'Ales' an exceptionally good political reference as a member of the Comparty.... completely aware that he is Communist in an illegal position, with all the ensuing consequences," and recommends (according to the notes) that he be approached at the UN conference by "Sergei" (NKVD agent Vladimir Pravdin,^[249] then under cover as head of the Soviet TASS news agency)^[250] or Gorsky, "alluding either to the password, or to 'Ruble', or simply to 'Ales's' progressive attitudes."^[251]

Shortly thereafter, Hiss presided as Secretary General over the United Nations Charter Conference in San Francisco. James F. Byrnes, who became Secretary of State during the conference, said that despite his categorical instructions not to recommend any U.S. citizen for posts in the UN secretariat, Hiss recommended several dozen federal employees—members of Communist cells in the government, whose jobs were at risk under a tightened security program.^[252]

In April 1945, Glasser slipped a warning to Anatoly Gorsky, chief of Soviet intelligence in the U.S., that the FBI had notified Stettinius that Bureau surveillance had followed a bundle of State Department documents from Washington to New York, where they were photographed, then returned within 24 hours to Washington. Only three people had access to these documents, one of whom was "Ales." Stettinius told "Ales": "I hope it is not you."^[253]

That same month, at the San Francisco conference, Soviet UN Ambassador Andrei Gromyko nominated Hiss to be temporary secretary general of the United Nations.^[254] As one scholar notes, "It was astonishing for a Soviet diplomat to propose an American for what was then the UN's highest and most sensitive diplomatic post."^[255] In London that September, Gromyko repeated to Stettinius, now the new U.S. Ambassador to the UN, that he "would be very happy to see Alger Hiss appointed temporary secretary general."^[256] As Weinstein notes, "The endorsement of a leading American official by the Russians remains practically unique in the annals of Soviet-American diplomacy at this time."^[257] The same day Gromyko reiterated his endorsement of Hiss to Stettinius in London, Hiss proposed that the State Department create a new post, that of "special assistant for military affairs," linked to his Office of Special Political Affairs.^{[258][259][260]}

On June 4, 1945, six weeks after becoming President, Harry Truman was briefed about Venona, according to former National Security Agency officer Oliver Kirby, deputy director of the Russian code-breaking project.^[261] Based on notes Kirby made at the time, Jerrold Schecter, former National Security Council spokesman for the Carter administration, reported that Brig. Gen. Carter Clarke, chief of the Army Security Agency (precursor of the NSA), advised President Truman that the code-breakers were decrypting messages that revealed massive Soviet intelligence operations in the United States, though it was too early to identify operatives or operations.^[262] According to Kirby, Clarke described this meeting as "NDG" (no damn good),^[263] the president telling the general that his account of code-breaking sounded "like a fairy story."^[264]

Defections and Investigations

Igor Gouzenko

Two days before Hiss proposed the creation of a "special assistant for military affairs," GRU code clerk Igor Gouzenko had defected from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, telling the FBI that one Lt. Kulakov in the office of the Soviet military attaché told him that he had learned in Moscow prior to his departure in May 1945 that an assistant to then U.S. Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius was a Soviet spy.^[265][266] Stettinius' aide at the time was Alger Hiss.^[267] Following up on Gouzenko's revelations, Raymond Murphy of the State Department again interviewed Chambers, who repeated that Hiss' assignment was "to mess up policy."^[268]

Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King wrote that acting under-secretary of state for external affairs Robertson told him that Gouzenko’s documents disclosed that “everything was much worse than we would have believed…. Stettinius [had] been surrounded by spies, etc….”^[269]

On September 25, journalist Walter Winchell again broached the subject on his broadcast, reporting, "It can be categorically stated that the question of the loyalty and integrity of one high American official has been called to the attention of the President." Weinstein calls this "a clear reference to Hiss," adding that Winchell was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's "most intimate journalistic confidante."^[270]

Elizabeth Bentley

On November 27, the FBI disseminated a secret report to the State Department, the Attorney General, and the Truman White House, reporting Chambers' identification of Hiss as a secret member of the Communist underground apparatus in contact with the Ware group.^[271] Three days later, defecting Soviet courier Elizabeth Bentley advised FBI investigators that Victor Perlo told her that Harold Glasser had been taken away from the “Perlo Group” and turned over to a Russian “by some American in some governmental agency in Washington.” She said that Charles Kramer (who would be identified by both Lee Pressman^[272] and Nathaniel Weyl^[273] as a member of the Ware group) told her that the person who had done this “was named Hiss and that he was in the U.S. State Department.”^[274]

Bentley's unlikely account was corroborated by an April 25, 1945 memo from Pavel Fitin, head of NKVD foreign intelligence, to NKVD Chief Vsevolod Merkulov, noting that Glasser had worked for both the NKVD and GRU:

Bentley said after "Jack" (Soviet agent Joseph Katz)^[275] asked her who Hiss was, she clipped an article from the New York daily PM (whose Washington correspondent, I.F. Stone, engaged in "cooperation with Soviet intelligence" as an "agent of influence"^[276][277] designated in encrypted Soviet cables by the code name "Blin")^{[278][279][280][281]} “in which Hiss was mentioned.” She said “It is my present recollection that this newspaper article stated Hiss’ full name was Eugene [sic] Hiss and that he was an adviser to Dean Acheson in the State Department.”^[282] FBI investigation quickly closed in on Alger Hiss.^[283]

Anatoly Gorsky, chief of Soviet intelligence in the U.S. during World War II, would author an internal Soviet secret police memorandum three years later, in which he would list 43 Soviet sources and intelligence officers likely to have been identified to U.S. authorities by Bentley after her defection. Included on the list was Alger Hiss.^[284]

Investigations

In 1946, the FBI again interviewed Hiss. Hiss denied ever being a Communist, and denied knowledge of any of his friends being Communists. He did, however, add that he had heard it said that Lee Pressman was either a Party member or followed the Party line.^[285] That year, British intelligence supplied its order of battle against Soviet-led guerrillas in Greece to the Pentagon. Shortly thereafter, this top-secret information appeared in the column of Drew Pearson (whose reporter, David Karr, was a "competent KGB source"),^[286][287] forcing the British army to withdraw, a move that would have delivered Greece to the Kremlin had not the U.S. intervened. According to de Toledano, “Deputy Assistant Secretary of State J. Anthony Panuch, in charge of security, tracked down the source of the leak. He discovered that Hiss had asked the Pentagon for this information, though it had nothing to do with his work as director of the Office of Special Political Affairs.”^[288]

State Department security officers discovered that Hiss' desk calendar for September 14, 1946, recorded a meeting Hiss did not schedule through the department (and for which he made no official record) with "McLean [sic], British Emb."^[289] Donald Maclean was a diplomat at the British Embassy in Washington who was also a Soviet agent and member of the Cambridge spy ring. He would defect to the Soviet Union in 1951,^[290] where he would be rewarded with the rank of Colonel in the KGB.^[291]

Secretary of State James Byrnes told the FBI he would have fired Hiss, but for the mandatory Civil Service Commission hearing, which would have revealed confidential sources on the case.^[292] In November 1946, the Bureau disseminated to the State Department, Attorney General and Truman White House a second secret report, this time reporting Bentley's allegations regarding "Eugene Hiss," suggesting that this might actually be a reference to Alger Hiss.^[293] FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover asked President Harry S. Truman for permission to take action against Hiss, but Truman remained "stubbornly antagonistic" to the allegations.^[294]

After a 1946 grand jury began looking into Soviet espionage, Congress took an interest in Hiss, finally forcing the State Department to remove him from access to secrets.^[295] In January, 1947, Byrnes quietly eased Hiss out of the State Department.^[296] Hiss became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, serving also as a trustee on the Institute of Pacific Relations.^[297]

House Committee on Un-American Activities

Following up on testimony given by Bentley, on August 3, 1948, the House Committee on Un-American Activities called Whittaker Chambers. He repeated under oath what he had been telling State Department officials Berle and Murphy, and the FBI, about the Ware group, starting in 1939.^[298] When Chambers testified against Hiss, wrote Sudoplatov, "we considered this to be a setback for GRU intelligence activities in the United States."^[299]

Two days later, Hiss testified, denying that he ever even knew Chambers, in a statement Secretary of State Dean Acheson helped write.^[300] Hiss "asked the committee to disregard the evidence and follow its emotions:

That day, President Truman finally reviewed Hiss’ FBI file. Pronouncing Hiss “guilty as hell,” Truman told White House Special Counsel Samuel Rosenman, “We shouldn't just indict this son of a bitch. We should hang him.”^[304] Five minutes later, Truman blustered to a press conference that the Hiss case was just an election-year “red herring”^{[305][306][307]} (a characterization he would repeat as late as 1956).^[308] When Rosenman later asked why he had lied, Truman explained, “You don't understand. The Republicans aren't after Alger Hiss. They're after me. I had to take the political view.”^[309] (That year, referring to Venona,^[310] Truman told Secretary of Defense James Forrestal there were "too many unknowns" in the partially decoded Soviet messages,^[311] saying, "Even if part of this is true, it would open up the whole red panic again.")^[312]

So strong was Hiss' denial that the committee wanted to drop the investigation.^[313] But one member, freshman Congressman Richard M. Nixon (R-Calif.) insisted that either Chambers or Hiss was lying about whether they had known one another,^[314] and he asked the committee to appoint him to head a subcommittee to find out which one.^[315][316]

On August 16, Chambers offered to take a lie-detector test.^[317] Hiss refused (a refusal he kept up for the rest of his life),^[318] but he dared Chambers to repeat his charges outside of the immunity afforded in congressional hearings, so Hiss could sue him. In her newspaper column that day, Eleanor Roosevelt set the tone of respectable opinion, writing, "Smearing good people like Lauchlin Currie, Alger Hiss and others is, I think, unforgivable .... Anyone knowing Mr. Currie or Mr. Hiss, who are the two people whom I happen to know fairly well, would not need any denial on their part to know they are not Communists. Their records prove it."^[319] (Currie was the NKVD agent^[320][321] in the White House^[322][323] who tipped the Kremlin off in 1944 that the U.S. was on the verge of breaking the Soviet code.)^{[324][325][326]}

The next day, Truman aide George Elsie wrote to White House Counsel Clark Clifford, "Justice should make every effort to ascertain if Whittaker Chambers is guilty of perjury." No suggestion was made that Justice make any effort at all to ascertain if Hiss might be guilty of perjury, but a handwritten insertion advised "Investigation of Chambers' confinement in a mental institution."^[327] (Again, no suggestion was made that Hiss' mental health history might be subject to investigation.) In falling for the fiction that Chambers had been committed to an insane asylum, the Truman administration was "taken in by disinformation being spread by the American Communist party and Alger Hiss's partisans."^[328]

On August 27, on NBC's Meet the Press, Chambers called Hiss' bluff, saying, "Alger Hiss was a Communist and may be now."^[329] Embarrassment mounted among Hiss' supporters as a month dragged by and still no suit was filed. Even the Washington Post began to have doubts.^[330] Finally, on September 28, Hiss filed his long-threatened slander suit against Chambers.

Hiss' suit against Chambers

The Baltimore Documents

In a pre-trial "discovery" deposition for the suit, Hiss's attorneys told Chambers to produce "any correspondence, either typewritten or in handwriting" from Hiss. Chambers retrieved the packet he had given his wife's nephew in 1938, which had been hidden in a dumbwaiter shaft.^[331] Three days later, Chambers turned over to Hiss' attorneys 43 typewritten documents (65 pages) and five handwritten memoranda, some so sensitive that for security reasons they could not safely be made public, though already a decade old.^[332] Hiss conceded that the typed pages appeared to be copies of authentic State Department documents, and admitted that four of the handwritten memos appeared to be in his handwriting.^[333]

Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas J. Donegan told the FBI that Assistant Attorney General Alexander M. Campbell, head of the Criminal Division at Truman Justice, “now wants to institute perjury charges against Chambers” for not revealing the documents before this. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's handwritten addendum comments, “I wonder why they don't move against Hiss also.”^[334] The Truman administration's determination to indict Chambers rather than Hiss was unusual, as two leading scholars of the case note:

The Pumpkin Papers

On December 2, in response to a subpoena, Chambers led HUAC investigators on his Maryland farm to a pumpkin he had hollowed out the night before and in which he had secreted five rolls (two developed strips and three undeveloped rolls, one of which later proved to have been lightstruck)^[336] of 35 milimeter film.^[337] The film included fifty-eight frames, mostly photos of State and Navy Department documents, dated January 5 through April 1, 1938 (the so-called Pumpkin Papers). The State Department documents dealt with a wide variety of subjects, including U.S. intentions with respect to the Soviet Union, the Spanish Civil War, and Germany's takeover of Austria.^[338] Some of the documents on the film were initialed by Hiss and came from his office.^[339] Some were of a highly sensitive, classified nature.^[340] Some State Department cables bearing Hiss' handwritten initials had direct bearing on matters major Soviet interest, including Chinese Communist strategy during the war with Japan and Chinese-Soviet relations.^[341]

According to Chambers, some of the microfilm was made by a contact he knew only as "Felix," who would photograph documents with a Leica purchased by the Communist underground. For such work, said Chambers, Felix had been trained in Moscow, where he traveled on a forged U.S. passport. In 1949 Chambers would lead FBI investigators to the Baltimore block in which he thought Felix had lived in the 1930s. The Bureau discovered that a Felix Inslerman had lived on the block, later moving to Schenectady, N.Y., where he worked on a secret guided-missile project, in 1946 becoming one of the few civilians to attend the atomic tests at Bikini.

Both before the grand jury and in the second Hiss trial, Inslerman would refuse to answer questions on grounds of potential self-incrimination. But in Inslerman's Schenectady home, the FBI found a Leica whose imperfections matched the scratch marks on Chambers' famed pumpkin film. In 1954, Inslerman would corroborate Chambers' story under oath.^[342]

The day Chambers revealed the "pumpkin papers," on an FBI memorandum detailing the perjury investigation ordered by Truman Justice on Chambers, Hoover penned, "I can't understand why such effort is being made to indict Chambers to the exclusion of Hiss."^[343] As late as December 6, Truman Justice was still contemplating "bringing an indictment against Chambers for perjury."^[344]

On that day, Hiss's attorney Edward McLean gave the defense's documents examiner, J. Howard Haring, a batch of old Hiss family letters that Hiss had given him the previous September, two months before Chambers produced the documents. Immediately identifying the typeface as that of a Woodstock typewriter, Haring reported that one of Mrs. Hiss's 1933 letters "was typed on the same machine as the Chambers documents." McLean informed the Hisses of this finding the same day. The next day, according to another of Hiss' lawyers, John F. Davis: "Alger ... asked [me to] check on an old machine which he remembers he gave to Pat, the son of Claudia Catlett...." Yet Hiss continued to swear under oath that he remembered neither the make nor disposition of the typewriter.^[345]

Hiss would later change his story, testifying that he gave the typewriter to the Catletts in 1937, before the date of the documents produced by Chambers. Pat Catlett, however, would tell defense lawyers that Hiss gave the Catletts the typewriter in the spring of 1938, just after the dates of the documents.^[346]

On December 13, the FBI independently located specimens of Priscilla Hiss's typing from the 1930s. The FBI laboratory concluded, like Haring, that all the papers in question had been typed on the same typewriter, a Woodstock.^[347]

Another defense expert, Harry E. Cassidy, concluded that Priscilla Hiss not only typed the Chambers documents, but wrote all the handwritten corrections on the typed documents. Asked by Hiss's attorneys whether it was more likely that Hiss or Chambers had written these corrections, Haring responded: "I am inclined to the opinion that the AH [Alger Hiss] corrections more closely resemble the QUESTIONED writing, than do the writings of WC [Whittaker Chambers]." A third defense expert, Edwin Fearon, agreed, reporting to the Hiss lawyers: "The corrections appearing in Exhibits 5-47 inclusive (exception—Exhibit 10) bear a closer resemblence [sic] to the handwritten corrections made by AH than to those made by WC." Fearon added that all but one of the documents were "typed on Woodstock typewriter no.N230099"—the Hiss' machine.^[348]

On December 15, Alger Hiss proposed to the grand jury a theory that someone (perhaps Chambers)^[349] had sneaked into the State Department and stolen the documents from his desk^[350] then, having somehow obtained access to Hiss' typewriter,^[351] typed some of the documents on it^[352] and microfilmed others, and then sneaked back into the State Department and replaced the originals,^[353] all in an elaborate plot to frame Hiss^[354] a decade later.^[355] Even Hiss admitted that his theory was "fantastic,"^[356] stating, "Until the day I die, I shall wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into my house to use my typewriter," a statement provoking outright laughter among jurors.^[357]

Hiss testified that he never gave any documents to Whittaker Chambers, and that he had no contact with Chambers after January 1, 1937. The grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury, charging that he lied under oath in both these statements. Because the statute of limitations had expired, the grand jury could not consider espionage charges.

Since Chambers had gained the upper hand by voluntary waiving immunity from slander, the columnist Walter Lippman (whose secretary, Mary Price, was a Soviet agent)^{[358][359][360][361]} suggested that Hiss turn the tables by waiving the statute of limitations on espionage. Hiss never took him up on that suggestion.^[362]

The Trials

At trial, Hiss provided an all-star cast of character witnesses, including such notables as Adlai Stevenson, Justice Felix Frankfurter, and former Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis. However, both Under Secretary Welles and Sayre testified that delivering the classifed documents to a foreign power would enable them to break America's most secret codes.^[363]

At Hiss’ first perjury trial, Hornbeck testified that an unnamed friend had warned him that Hiss was a Communist fellow-traveler, but he disregarded the warning.^[364] At the second trial, Hornbeck testified that on at least two occasions he was warned that Hiss was a Communist, and named Bullitt as his source.^[365] John Foster Dulles, who had recommended Hiss for the Carnegie Endowment, likewise testified at that trial that various people had warned him subsequently that Hiss was a Communist.^[366]

The prosecution called Hede Massing, but at the first trial Judge Samuel H. Kaufman ruled that her testimony was irrelevant. At the second trial, Judge Henry W. Goddard allowed her to testify about Hiss' 1935 attempt to get Noel Field to transfer from her OGPU group to Hiss' GRU group.^[367] To avoid testifying, Field fled to the East bloc.^[368]

Hiss's friend and former colleague, Charles Wyzanski, Senior District Judge of the U. S. District Court in Boston, testified in both trials in defense of Hiss. Wyzanski, who "initially had supposed [Hiss] innocent," later concluded that "Hiss was guilty," as did Hiss' own attorney, William L. Marbury.^[369]

Conviction

The first trial ended in a hung jury, with eight for conviction and four against. The second trial produced a unanimous verdict: Guilty on both counts. In his pre-sentencing statement, Hiss said, "I am confident that in the future the full facts showing how Whittaker Chambers was able to carry out forgery by typewriter will be developed."^[370]

Hiss was sentenced to five years in federal prison. Secretary of State Dean Acheson provoked outrage by commenting, ""Whatever the outcome of any appeal which Mr. Hiss or his lawyer may take, I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss." Eleanor Roosevelt added to the furor with her comment, "It seems rather horrible to condemn someone on the word of someone else who admits to guilt." Time magazine commented that she "obviously had not been paying much attention," being "unaware of, or determined to ignore, the corroborating evidence introduced by the Government."^[371]

That year, General of the Army Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed President Truman that Venona had "positively identified" Hiss and Harry Dexter White as Soviet agents.^[372] According to Bradley, Truman said, "That G—D— stuff. Every time it bumps into us it gets bigger and bigger. It's likely to take us down."^[373]

Hiss appealed, but his conviction was affirmed by the Court of Appeals^[374] and his writ of coram nobis (orchestrated by long-time Communist Party member Victor Rabinowitz)^[375] denied certiorari by the Supreme Court. Hiss served 44 months of his five-year sentence in Lewisburg Federal Prison before being released in 1954.

Disbarred, Hiss became a salesman. But, despite the mountains of evidence against him that only increased as incriminatory Soviet bloc documents came to light following the collapse of Communism, Hiss continued for the rest of his life to claim innocence.

Corroboration from Soviet archives

According to Library of Congress Cold War historian John Earl Haynes,^[376] Alger Hiss’s known cryptonyms were "Lawyer"^[377] ("Advocate"^[378] or "Advokat"^[379]), during his time at the United States Department of Justice (1935-36), "Ales"^{[380][381][382]} in 1945, and "Leonard" in the "Gorsky memo."^[383]

The Volkogonov affair

After the fall of Soviet Communism in 1991, former President Nixon and the director of his presidential library, John H. Taylor, petitioned the new Russian President Boris Yeltsin to open the Soviet archives relating to the Hiss-Chambers case. Meanwhile Hiss and his lawyer^[384] appealed to retired Soviet Army General Dmitri Volkogonov and the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) for confirmation that Lowenthal's "client, Alger Hiss," had never been "an agent of the NKVD."^[385] (This despite the fact that the evidence implicates Hiss as an agent of the GRU, not the NKVD.)^{[386][387][388][389][390][391][392][393][394]}

Volkogonov, as apparatchik in charge of Soviet military history under the Communists